My Paris Journals
Since learning that our friend writer Matthew Goodman would be in Paris with his wife Cassie in late April, I’ve been revisiting the journals I kept while exploring Paris on past trips with Kit. When Matthew and Cassie began sharing pictures from their walks around the city, discoveries in train stations and a meal at their favorite Paris restaurant, my mind drifted back to some of my own memorable Paris moments.
Paris is a city of monumental beauty and unforgettable moments. On a visit in 2003, Kit was reading about the art of flânerie—“that eminently Parisian compromise between laziness and activity” as defined by writer Edmund White in “The Flâneur.” As a compromise, I suggested we stroll, use the city’s superb metro system, stop at outdoor cafés and in parks to write in our journals, and take late afternoon naps at our apartment in the historic Marais district in order to be fresh for evening dinners at local cafés.
While waiting one morning for a train in the Chemin Vert Métro station, Kit photographed me in front of a huge poster of a woman’s shiny red toenails. “I never go anywhere without my feet,” the caption read. That night, I painted my toenails with Revlon’s No. 711—a berry red polish named “Wine with Everything.” From that colorful moment on, my feet and I were one with the city.
Music also added color to our Paris days. Like magic, musical interludes often came unannounced. Under a 17th century archway at the Place des Vosges, a couple sang sacred kyrielle—music of love and peace. Listening to their crystalline voices, pure as those of angels, tears streamed down my face as I pressed my hands to my heart to keep it from flying away. As our we moved from one Metro station to the next beneath the streets of Paris, a woman sang “Besemé Mucho” while her little girl moved through the aisle gathering donations in a small cup. On another train, a man pulled out a violin and played as if imagining himself in the orchestra pit at the Paris Opera. Two decades later, Matthew informed me of Piano En Gare—a program that places pianos in French train stations “for you to play.”
One day, we learned that a concert would be taking place the following evening in the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés—the oldest surviving abbey church in Paris. The next morning, after a café au lait and pain au chocolat at an outdoor café in the Place des Vosges, we walked to the Bastille and wound our way through the center of Île Saint Louis. On the Île de la Cîte, we visited the Cathédrale Notre-Dame, then strolled the tree-lined quays past the picturesque bridges that connect the right and left banks of the Seine. At Rue Bonaparte we left the river behind us and wandered past small shops and galleries that characterize this Left Bank neighborhood. At Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, we found the church open and bought two tickets for the evening concert.
By then, it was almost noon. “How about a leisurely lunch at a rooftop cafe with a view of the entire city?” I said to Kit. “We’ll need to walk back to the Seine, cross the Pont-Neuf bridge near the Louvre Museum. Then, one monumental city block away we should arrive at a historic landmark that I think will surprise us both.”
La Samaritaine, built in 1926, is a fashionable department store with an iron framework and Art Deco style interior galleries under a large dome. After taking a central elevator up nine floors, we walked up to a 10th floor rooftop café and found an empty table at the front railing next to planters filled with lavender and assorted herbs. (Note: In need of renovations, La Samaritaine was closed in 2005. After consultations with the City of Paris, it was restored in stages by the Japanese architectural firm Sanaa and reopened in 2021. Mathew shared a picture of its dazzling reborn Art Deco interior last week.)
From La Samaritaine’s aerie rooftop café, Kit and I picked out sites visited during our week in Paris—the Picasso Museum, Hemingway’s favorite haunts in Montparnasse, the Panthéon, the Luxembourg Gardens, the Musée d’Orsay, Sacré-Coeur atop the hills of Montmartre, the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. While Kit penned postcards to friends, I took out my journal and recorded the route we’d walked that morning.
That evening, we played the role of flâneurs at Les Deux Magots—a nineteenth century literary brasserie with outdoor tables across from Saint-Germaine-des-Prés. The exquisitely performed musical program that night was one I remember to this day—Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, Mozart’s A Little Night Music, Albinoni’s Adagio, and Pachelbel’s Canon in D. In that grand and ancient space, the musicians recreated the soft airs of Vivaldi, holding us magically beneath a vaulted canopy of spring.
Two decades later as Matthew and Cassie experience April in Paris, the moments I captured in my Paris journal two decades ago continue to travel with me. As Ernest Hemingway once told a friend, “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”